And this chatter just never stops. Over and over, characters spend whole episodes tied down in small rooms or living previous events through a flashback, and they spend that time talking peudo-philosophical claptrap to each other as if it meant something. Technically, it’s the noire-crime-vigilante equivalent of Geordi and Data explaining that maybe they could recalibrate the positronic emitter: it’s incidental genre-flavored business that moves you to the next plot point. Only here it is treated as the thing itself and goes on forever.

Worse most of these interminable monologues are delivered by either Charlie Cox, who I find near unwatchably dull, or by Jon Bernthal, who played my least favorite character on Walking Dead (a show in which I disliked everyone, so there was serious competition for the spot of “least favorite”).

Daredevil only ever lurches forward at moments when people are untied, let out of their rooms and things actually happen. In the final episodes, when the story has to be wrapped up in a rush, events pick up speed and life begins to gleam through the gloomy cracks. It’s even exciting. I just wish that it didn’t all feel like a quick push to get to the long list of “unresolved and soon to be revisited issues” of the final episode.

This show is trying something new and is figuring things out as it goes along. I also really like Jessica Karen (a fave from True Blood). So I am willing to cut some slack. But I hope that it will get over this hump so that I won’t have to.

I stopped watching this series early on, and then, encouraged by my brother who loved it, and the positive attention it was receiving from people I read on the web, I pushed through to the end and finished it.

I understand the attention it received: it’s a good series. There are inspired moments both in the directing and the acting. The writing is also top-notch first-season work. Ultimately though, I couldn’t tolerate the violence.

Which got me thinking: what is it about the violence in this show that reads so differently from the violence of something like John Wick? I think there are two things going on.

First, the investment asked of me as I watch the violence in the two stories is not the same. In Daredevil, Murdock acts out of a sense of justice and morality. He is there to solve Hell’s Kitchen’s problems by doing what is right, what is needed. So in a sense, the show asks me to accept that sometimes, you need to beat the shit out of people, break their bones and joints, and even, sometimes, throw them off buildings, and I won’t go there. John Wick is very different. It is a film about grief and anger, and Wick is clearly not doing the right thing. The right thing was leaving violence behind in the life recalled (after its loss) at the beginning of the film. The film’s violence happens after a fall from grace and asks for nothing from me but basic empathy — yes, grief and anger can drive people to doing terrible things — and in exchange, it offers catharsis.

Second, the two stories link themselves to the world outside the story differently. John Wick builds a fantastic, genre-appropriate world that is vast but discrete and the narrative plays out within it in exaggerated but finite terms. Wick’s world is not “the real world.” Daredevil on the other hand — and this is a key aspect of Marvel’s emerging house style — presents its fictional world as an allegory of our world and the “necessary violence” of the protagonist as an insight into what’s needed to solve its problems. I think that view of the world is wrong, ugly, even perverse, and so the allegory ruins the whole show for me.